Working Through Memory and Forgetting in Victorian Literature

CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by The University of Sydney: Sydney eScholarship Journals online Working through Memory and Forgetting in Victorian Literature Robert Douglas-Fairhurst Figure 1: Julia Margaret Cameron, Mnemosyne (1868) © The Cleveland Museum of Art. “There is a goddess of Memory, Mnemosyne; but none of Forgetting,” Richard Holmes writes in “A Meander Through Memory and Forgetting,” “Yet there should be, as they are twin sisters, twin powers, and walk on either side of us, disputing for sovereignty over us and who we are, all the way until death” (95). It is hard to avoid the Victorian Mnemosyne, who makes regular guest appearances in the period’s photography and art (Julia Margaret Cameron and Dante Gabriel Rossetti both produced works with the title Mnemosyne), but we should also remember her shadowy twin. For if the nineteenth century was busy with writers exploring memory’s lurking tenacity and shaping force, the same writers were equally attracted to its unpredictable lapses and blind spots. Throughout the period these twin powers worked closely together, quarrelling or collaborating, and for many writers this was not only a matter of psychological or philosophical enquiry. It was also a matter of style. The cultural importance of memory to Victorian readers was evident in the many books and pamphlets that claimed to teach “Mnemotechny” (Miles), “Phrenotypics” (Spurgeon), or other systems of mnemonics. This wasn’t a wholly new phenomenon – Richard Grey’s Memoria Technica, first published in 1730, remained in print for over a century, with a revised edition being issued as late as 1861 – but such works found an especially eager readership in the Victorian atmosphere of self-help. They also chimed with several other attempts in the period to investigate and exploit memory’s mysterious hidden workings. New 2 Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies 21.1 (2016) technologies such as the photograph – famously characterised by Oliver Wendell Holmes as “the mirror with a memory” (74) – and later the phonograph added an uncanny persistence to what had previously been as hard to capture as a fistful of smoke. Meanwhile, mechanistic models of the mind stressed its ability to retain what might seem to have passed us by. It was a human camera: “Absolute as a photograph,” according to E. S. Dallas, “the mind refuses nought” (Taylor and Shuttleworth 149), while the phrase “photographic memory” came into general use towards the end of the century. More accurately, the mind was a palimpsest, a text that could make discontinuous impressions appear simultaneously present, allowing historical sequence and causality to be replaced by unreliable rhythms of skipping and lingering. And as memory came to be seen as an increasingly complicated branching power, so language was forced to work ever harder to keep up, with the addition of new phrases that included “memory-haunted” (1845), “memory book” (1868), “muscular memory” (1883), “memory work” (1884), “memory lapse” (1893), “memory span” (1897), “memory-trace” (1901), and many more. Viewed in this context, even well-known works of Victorian literature acquire a new sheen of unfamiliarity. For example, when Lewis Carroll’s Alice falls down a rabbit hole into Wonderland, she notices that the sides of the hole “were filled with cupboards and book- shelves,” with “maps and pictures hung upon pegs”; as she is passing, she picks up a jar labeled “ORANGE MARMALADE” (12-13). At the end of the story, we learn that she has been dreaming, and her initial tumble represents a pun of the kind Carroll could never resist: she is falling asleep. In doing so, she is also reviewing her past in a series of muddled snapshots: her maps and pictures come from the schoolroom; the marmalade comes from the breakfast table. In effect, the scene is like an unconscious version of the memory game that the French conjurer Robert-Houdin used to play with his son in order to train him for their “second sight” act, by walking past a shop window and seeing how many items he could recall. The difference here is that Alice’s mind is both the shopkeeper and the passing child; the only items on display are those she has already stored on what Carroll would later refer to as memory’s “odd corners and shelves” (Letters 2:688). Figure 2: “Alice found herself falling down what seemed to be a very deep well” Illustration: William Henry Romaine Walker, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1908) Robert Douglas-Fairhurst 3 A more complicated example of the same phenomenon occurs when Dickens’s David Copperfield imagines returning to his old home: . it pained me to think of the dear old place as altogether abandoned; of the weeds growing tall in the garden, and the fallen leaves lying thick and wet upon the paths. I imagined how the winds of winter would howl round it; how the cold rain would beat upon the window-glass, how the moon would make ghosts on the walls of the empty rooms, watching their solitude all night. I thought afresh of the grave in the churchyard, underneath the tree: and it seemed as if the house were dead too, now, and all connected with my father and mother were faded away. (241) Fading away, perhaps, but not altogether dead and gone. In 1856, Dickens would publish an article on “A Way to Remember” in Household Words that recommended “the association of ideas” as a powerful aid to recollection: remember a, the writer advised, and that will help call up b, followed by c, and so on (Heraud 616). What this earlier passage shows is that similar associative chains might couple a speaker to his past in a far less welcome way, and these might be audible in how he speaks as well as in what he says: in the syntax of his sentences, the acoustic texture of his voice. A sudden historical gulp in the narrator’s throat, “as if the house were dead too, now,” is picked up and refracted through the hows of the passage, and these hows then continue to revolve around the howl of the wind. Part of the narrative’s psychological drama, these internal echoes occupy a threshold between conscious and repressed knowledge; as Adam Piette has observed, in a discussion of the way that prose’s sound patterns can mimic the workings of memory, such echoes mark the stresses of David’s childhood that give an involuntary inflection to his adult voice (17-18). And when we come across this description, it snags on our ears too, meaning that even as the narrative is propelling us forward its sounds keep summoning us back. If such techniques can generate delicate local effects in prose, they are central to the very form of poetry, so perhaps it is not surprising that so many Victorian poets gravitated to memory as a subject. Walter Savage Landor, L. E. L., Edmund Gosse, D. G. and Christina Rossetti, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are just some of those who wrote poems entitled “Memory,” in addition to Matthew Arnold’s “A Memory-Picture,” Thomas Hardy’s “Memory and I,” William Barnes’s “Memory’s Stores,” and many others. Often these were self-consciously compact in form (many were sonnets), which allowed memory to be both a subject and an important mode of transmission. What they shared was a practical understanding of the demands and freedoms of poetic form that made it one of memory’s natural homes. Poetry’s formal structures are especially good at capturing small associative links, and showing how they contribute to the deepening grooves of a speaker’s consciousness. A number of Victorian writers found this an attractive idea. Frances Power Cobbe, for example, explained in “The Fallacies of Memory” (1867) that one way to avoid recollections being distorted over time was to place them in regular verse; in this way “The trace they make in the memory each time they are repeated is marked precisely in the same furrow” (Taylor and Shuttleworth 153). But of course sounding out an idea through repetition is not only something that many poems facilitate. It is something they enact. As Don Paterson has wittily pointed out, “A poem is a little machine for remembering itself” (184), because formal devices such as rhythm, refrain, rhyme, and so on, move the writing on while turning back on themselves. When the speaker of Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After” urges 4 Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies 21.1 (2016) himself “Forward,” he also tells himself to “remember how the course of Time will swerve, / Crook and turn upon itself in many a backward streaming curve” (Poems 3:158), and as his choice of “turn” might remind us, drawing on the Latin root of “verse” as “vertere” (“to turn”), this is what all regular poems do. Even jingles such as “Remember, remember, the fifth of November” provide compact models of recollection, by forging acoustic links in their own form, and more complicated poems work in a similar way. Rhyme disrupts linear reading by asking us to check ourselves: it thickens the texture of sound at selected points, alerting us to the fact that although writing is printed evenly across the page, life is far more uneven in the demands it makes on us, or that we make on it. And because a poem’s most striking rhymes usually coincide with line endings, they are little acts of memory that occur just as the verse is preparing to test itself against a moment of silence and blankness; we read the final word of a line such as “remember how the course of Time will swerve,” anticipate how the course of the poem’s syntax may also swerve or stumble, and then our eyes have to cross a miniature version of what Shakespeare in Richard III calls “the swallowing Gulfe of dark Forgetfulnesse, and deepe Oblivion” (III.vii) before we can continue.

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